Competitors say that Microsoft’s EU plan is still flawed

Just before a decision by the European Commission on Microsoft's newest …

Microsoft is anxiously awaiting the decision by the European Commision (EU) on their newest antitrust compliance proposal, but their competitors aren't. For those that don't know, Microsoft submitted the proposal in May as a response to a 2004 finding from the EU that Microsoft has abused their market share on desktop computers to help increase their share of the server market because other server products weren't able to provide the same interoperability with Microsoft's desktop operating systems. Microsoft was fined €497 million.

The EU submitted the proposal to industry groups Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Samba interoperability project. The FSFE was not impressed.

"They have improved on the initial offer, but the problem is that the initial offer is deeply flawed," said Carlo Piana, a partner with Tamos Piana & Partners, which represents the FSFE. "The whole approach is wrong."

While Microsoft is making a rather sizeable chunk of information available for licensing, Piana said that it is next to impossible for developers to know if it's enough.

"You should have a way of licensing anything you need?any information necessary to accomplish certain tasks. Instead, they hand you a pile of paper, and you're expected to understand what's inside," he said. "Even without taking free software into account, what they're proposing is highly inefficient. It would be hard to understand for anyone, including proprietary developers."

Volker Lendecke, co-founder of Service Network (SerNet) and a Samba developer, is also criticizing the plan for not placing some of the information needed to allow competitors to have a real "Windows-compatibile implementation" under a royalty-free license.

"We really want all of the protocols needed to make Windows clients and Windows servers fully believe we are a Windows-compatible implementation. To compete, we need to be able to match the behavior of the network one to one," Lendecke said.

Despite all of the criticism, the EU says they remain commited to making the right decision. Neelie Kroes, EU Competition Commissioner, has said that she is determined to properly implement the antitrust decision including "the ability for developers of open-source software to take advantage of the remedy."

Microsoft has not yet responded to the allegations by the FSFE and others, however when they filed the revised proposal in June, Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying "[the company had made] tough concessions [to resolve the problems with the first proposals]."

If the EU decides that Microsoft is not complying with their orders, they could face fines up to US$5 million a day.